A giant python attacked an Indonesian man, nearly severing his arm, before hungry villagers chopped up the reptile and ate it, a police chief said Wednesday.

Security guard Robert Nababan crossed paths with the giant creature while patrolling an oil palm plantation in the remote Batang Gansal subdistrict of Sumatra island on Saturday.

"The python was 7.8 metres long (25.6 feet), it was unbelievably huge," local police chief Sutarja, who like many Indonesians only has one name, told AFP.

I'm posting this here in Critter Country for two reasons: one, we have only the word of a single person on how big the snake is and the pictures provided are using obvious forced-perspective to make the snake look larger, and two, there's no way in hell that a python could "almost sever" a man's arm. Pythons have thin, needle-like teeth for grasping struggling prey- you get bitten by one and you're going to have a lot of little puncture wounds. Their teeth are not for cutting or tearing at all.

The original articles simply said he had been bitten in the left hand and had severed veins in his wrist, not nearly a nearly severed arm. Length is variously 6 or 7 meters. Dunno where the 7.8 came from. (Recent articles are, of course, about how the foreign media made an exaggerated spectacle of the story.)